By Paul E. Schindler Jr.

Some things are impossible to know, but it is impossible to know these things.

I no longer have a day job. I'm retired! So every word of this is my opinion, This offer IS void in Wisconsin. Except, of course, that some material in this column comes from incoming e-mail; such material is usually reproduced indented and in a serif typeface to distinguish it from the (somewhat) original material.

I avoided upgrading to IOS6 on my
iPhone for a long time because I didn't see anything I wanted and was
afraid it would mess me up. I also didn't want Apple's brain-dead map
ap as my default, and I didn't want to lose the You-tube player ap.
Then, at school, they installed Apple TV, but I couldn't project from
my phone. I thought it might be the IOS, so I upgraded. Turns out you
need a iPhone 4S to project and I have a 4. So, I did not get
the
one feature I wanted. And instead, it messed me up, in the ways I
expected, and a couple of new ones.

The
first time I opened
iTunes on my phone, all my podcasts were missing from my playlists.
This was extremely frustrating, because I could still see them in
iTunes on my desktop. I spent hours trying to work it out, then more
hours searching the Internet before a solution. Talk about badly posted
and hard to search for! I can only hope the words I have thrown around
this solution will help save others from my time and frustration.

IOS
6 automatically moves all your podcasts into a podcast ap that does not
have playlists. BUT, to fix this problem, all you have to do is delete
the podcast ap,
and all your podcasts fly back into your iTune playlists. Sure, I admit
that podcast handling in iTunes is terrible. But not being able to
organize your podcasts into playlists is much worse.

Credit
where credit is due, however, Apple did add a feature I have been
waiting for literally since the first day I played a podcast on my
iPhone. There was always a "10 seconds back" button to allow you to
repeat something you just heard (or more likely, didn't quite hear). I
yearned for a 10 seconds forward button, to speed past discussions in
which I wasn't interested. The button appeared in IOS 6, and what a joy
it has been. Sure, the time slider was always there, but while it is
great for a 3 minute song, it is very difficult to operate in a 30 or
60 minute podcast, especially if you are on the elliptical machine or
the stationary bike.

One great feature does not make up for
one appalling and badly documents foul-up, however. Overall: IOS 6,
continue to avoid it if you can.

The moment I saw the headline, How
the US Got Broadband Right,
I assumed it was written by someone from the Heritage Foundation or
some other right-wing think tank. I underestimated capitalism's
hypocrisy reserves, which is always a mistake. In fact, it
was
written by (or under the name of, in any case) Verizon president Lowell
McAdam. He's certainly got no skin in the game, huh? Doesn't matter to
him how the FCC comes down on Internet issues. In any case, I
immediately began monitoring the Internet for an intelligent, expert
response that would, I was sure, point out the numerous statistical
manipulations he used to disguise the fact that, as Harry Shearer likes
to say "We're not number one."

I was not disappointed. An
advocacy group for Open Internet called Public Knowledge (with Internet
pioneer Brewster Kahle on the board and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt
as a director emeritus), quickly posted this deconstruction
of just one of the clever almost-lies, distortions and half-truths
which the New York Times
allowed this huckster to palm off on America's thinking class. It is
depressing to me that intelligent people will now mistake our last
place status among the world's Internet users as first place. And hey,
don't forget McAdam's public plan to abandon copper everywhere,
including rural areas. In my distant suburb of Orinda (20 miles from SF), our
landline server is AT&T (which also wants to get out of the landline business). There is,
basically,
no cell service at my home because of our town's NIMBY planning process. Oops! Oh well, I guess McAdams wants me and several million other people to move
somewhere with more cellphone service, or take VOIP from the cable
company, whether I like it or not.

Here's hoping that the new
FCC chairman stands up for the people, and isn't a dupe who will spout
McAdams' garbage and carry his water.

In the meantime, I will
keep hoping for a point-by-point rebuttal, and will share the link
if/when I find it. In the meantime, if you'd like to bring your blood
to a boil, check out this analysis.
Of course, my protests, and yours, and pointless and hopeless. Money
talks and civilians bend over and grease up. I can afford whatever
expensive alternative I will soon need. Can you? Can your grandmother?

I place a lot of spoken-word MP3 files on my iPhone manually. It has been extremely frustrating to me that such files have no "30-second backup," and lose track of where you were if you switch to another file. These deficits have been a source of nearly endless frustration. So, this week I got off my dead keister and Googled the question. Turns out the solution is quite simple: simply tell the iPhone that the MP3 file IS a podcast.

CAUTION: For reasons I will explain later, don't do this until you have come up with a naming convention for your MP3 files. Trust me on this.

These instructions are for the Windows version of Itunes. If you have a Mac, YMMV.

Select the file you want, in either the music folder on your iphone, or in the playlist. You may select multiple files; this still works.

Hit ctrl-i (on a mac, I think the key combination is apple-i).

Click on the "options" tab

Under "Media Kind," select "podcast"

Click the "remember playback position" check box

That is almost there is to it. The special sauce, my intellectual contribution to this subject, comes from the fact that, once I had reset all these files, they no longer appeared in the Music folder on the iPhone. They also didn't suddenly appear in the Podcast folder. I stitched together information from several sites to come up with a way of managing the songs.

Experienced users realize that if you delete an MP3 file from a playlist, it is still on the phone, just not in the playlist. For songs and podcasts loaded the normal way, you can got to the folder "Music" or "Podcasts" on your iPhone. When you delete a file in one of those folders, it is really gone.

"Fake" podcasts appear in neither folder. How do you find them? How do you delete them? Well, you can delete them by selecting a file in a playlist, then hitting shift-delete (the key combo is different on a mac; I don't know what it is). Remember, if you just hit "delete," you delete the file from the playlist but NOT your iPhone.

What if you thoughtlessly delete, rather than shift delete? Like Charlie on the MTA, is your file destined to ride forever neath the streets of Boston? Well, no. You can still see every file on your iPhone if you create a Smart Playlist:

on the edit menu, select New Smart Playlist

Set a rule that none of your files will meet, like "artist is x"

The new smart playlist will now show every file on your iPhone, podcasts, music and "podcasts."

Here's a tip learned from painful experience: hand-loaded MP3 files are much easier to manage if you adopt a naming convention. All of mine start with an _ (underscore) character followed by the date (20120805--be sure to use the zeroes if you want alpha order to be equal to date order). Thus, a file I recorded last week would be "_20120815 programname."

It is not often I can make a contribution to the world's store of knowledge, but in this case, I feel I have synthesized and clarified a half-dozen articles. On the other hand, I may be the only person in the world whose iPhone is half loaded with hand-managed MP3 files.

Let me be clear about this. My wonderful new Dell Portable, a gift from my daughters, is, well, wonderful. They took pity on me and my technology (as they do from time to time) and decided that my slow, small, decade-old portable was no longer sufficient, especially since I am going out of town more these days. They wanted me to get a Macbook, but I stoutly resisted. There are still a few Windows aps to which I am addicted . Besides, I have to keep at least one PC in the house for the websites I use to support my wife's psychotherapy practice which require (REQUIRE!) Internet Explorer (they aren't fooled by Firefox's spoof mode either), not to mention the applications my school district runs, which also require IE. The temptation to wipe the portable down to the metal and install XP was significant, but I figured I'd be dragged screaming and kicking into the future. I do mean screaming and kicking.

My first experience with the fact that

Windows 7 Sucks

came when I was installing the cable modem for a friend. Comcast insists that you run an install Wizard application that Windows 7 refused to run. I tried it. It won't run, even in "Run as Administrator" mode, which was readily available to me. If you don't run the ap, Comcast will not activate your modem. After two hours, I desperately pushed the button on the Comcast website for "technician" mode. Turns out there weren't any questions I couldn't answer. But when I was done, Comcast insisted on yet another ap that Windows 7 stoutly refused to run, no matter how far down I set the security mode. Again, fortunately, the friend had an XP machine. Thank God!

Windows 7 Sucks

Not since we went from DOS to Windows back in 1991 have I seen a Microsoft operating system that broke more aps than 7, even in so-called "compatibility" mode. One of my favorite word games, E-Words, simply will not work in 7. The software company is long gone, so there won't be an upgrade. None of the other (free or paid) word games I can find does it for me like E-Words did. There's another ap gone; if Microsoft keeps breaking them, there won't be any reason for me NOT to convert to a Macbook.

Did I mention that Windows 7 sucks?

And the file system! Don't get me started on the file system. The default is an absolute refusal to let you anywhere near the Documents and Settings directory. And you're told, even if you're the administrator, that you can't chance the permissions. After a LENGTHY Google search, I found that you need to change the OWNERSHIP of the directory, under the advanced button. How messed up is that? In trying to be more like a Macintosh, Microsoft has succeeded in creating a nearly unusable operating system. As Steve Ballmer used to say, BOGU (you can look it up).

Here is something important. I have a 12-year-old, no longer supported by HP Laserjet 3015. It's a beautiful printer. Never given me a lick of trouble. If I hooked it directly to my new Dell, Windows 7 recognized it and installed it automatically. I spent three hours trying to install it as a network printer. All was futility. I could see it on the network, but I couldn't connect to it, no matter how much software I installed. I checked several dozen websites using various search terms. The last one I tried finally worked (isn't that always the case?).

The advice was simple, clear and brilliant. I am putting the link here in case you are having trouble (difficulty) creating a network connection between Windows 7 and an HP Laserjet 3015. That is, you cannot set up the 3015 as a network printer [that ought to be clear to all the search engines]. The only solution that works is Win7 Pro x64 bit HP LaserJet 3015 driver problem.

I am putting that link here, in my column, as a separate item, with a descriptive headline, in the hopes of boosting the Google rank of the helpful link above, since the solution it describes actually works. So, if you Google here looking for a solution, go have a look, and you're welcome.

Astrophysics,
stranger than fiction:
OK, the wave/particle duality is odd, quantum mechanics is weird,
spooky action at a distance is well, spooky. But those are all minor
league odd compared to this: Our
world may be a giant hologram. (Warning: read it soon, New
Scientist articles disappear behind a pay-per-view wall quickly).
Noise picked up by an instrument built to detect gravitational
waves may doom
the experiment because the universe itself does not have sufficient
resolution since it is merely a hologram! Not what they were looking
for, but a helluva discovery if true. Recent string theories suggest
the
apparently 3 dimensional universe actually has 7, 10, 11, or 26
dimensions. If Craig Hogan's theory is correct, the universe has only 2 dimensions. Welcome to Flatland!

The Crime of
Reason: I attended a great talk
by Stanford Professor Robert B. Laughlin, winner of the 1998 Nobel
Prize in Physics, on the subject of his new book The
Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind.
Prof. Laughlin laments the loss of public domain knowledge as more and
more critical information is sequestered as a threat to security and
commerce. If you research or innovate, you are increasingly seen as a
thief or a terrorist. Watch the video,
listen to a radio
interview or read the book, its an important perspective on our
world.

Recent Movies

Paul's Reading

Ann Patchett: This Is the Story of a Happy MarriageDavid Sedaris liked this book so much her arranged for Moe's Books of Berkeley to sell it in the lobby after his reading at Zellernbach Hall last year. I can see why; Pratchett is an interesting and able essayist. I haven't read her fiction, but if it is as good as her essays, it is good indeed. As a recently bereaved cat owner, I couldn't read her essay on the death of her dog, but all the others were fine. (*****)

Nora Ephron: The Most of Nora EphronI have always been a big fan of Nora Ephron, so I was enraptured with this omnibus, which includes her novel, her Harry met Sally screenplay and many of her essays, some of them previously uncorrected. They say you should never meet the authors you love, but I think I'd have enjoyed her, even if she was telling me to "get over it." (*****)

Edward St. Aubyn: Lost for Words: A NovelI heard the author on "Fresh Air" being interviewed by Terry Gross, and I am glad I did. I don't think I'd enjoy the Patrick Melrose books for which he is famous (based on the descriptions, I don't care to read them) but this relentlessly amusing sendup of the literary prize culture in Britain has laughs on every page, delivered with standard British panache. (*****)

Terry Pratchett's Discworld Books: Terry Pratchett has written 40 books about Discworld. I have read just over half of them, most recently Equal Rites. Everyone of them is hysterically funny and also makes a few comments about the world around us. His 2000 novel "The Truth" is one of the best journalism books ever written. He is a genius. (*****)

Dave Eggers: The Circle (Vintage)Finally, a novel of Silicon Valley with some literary merit. I have looked at the book club discussion questions, which make it clear to me that there's a whole lot going on I didn't get. But the parts I did get were a fascinating exploration of where we're going. As I used to teach students, "Science Fiction is not about what it is about, it is about the time in which it was written." True here. Marvelous and gripping. (*****)

Bob Garfield: BedfellowsCo-host of NPR's "On the Media" and Slate's "Lexicon Valley," Bob Garfield is a quick-witted, sharp-tongued commentator. This novel of the modern mafia in fictional Brooklyn is humorous and amusing (albeit not really laugh-out-loud funny), with a clever yet somehow contrived plot. Lots of swearing, not too much violence. I have read several books on my Sony E-reader; this is the first book I read on the Kindle I-phone ap. Weird experience. If you'd told me I'd ever read a book on my phone... (****)

Maria Semple: Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A NovelAnother case where "everybody" was right. All my print and electronic media sources pointed to this as a brilliant comic novel. Clearly, my analytical skills are deficient when it comes to print, because I can only repeat what I have written about several other books here: couldn't put it down. A mother-daughter tale, told mostly through documents and emails, and a delightfully barbed skewering of Seattle, one of America's most obvious and under-skewered targets. (*****)

Lionel Shriver: The New Republic: A NovelI am always on the outlook for the next "best journalism novel ever." For decades, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop was the gold standard, and it is still the funniest of the small handful of iconic novels that tell the truth about the life of journalists, particularly foreign correspondents. This, however, is a clever, well-written page turner that shows journos living the life I knew them to live when I was one decades ago. Plot contrivances? Sure. It was written before 9/11 and released this year, and if you didn't know you might guess. But just as Waugh's work caught the essence of the working journalist of his time, so too does this first rate novel. It deserves a place in the pantheon of "best journalism novels ever. (*****)

Danny Rubin: How To Write Groundhog DayRegular readers know I am a sucker for all things groundhog. Still, above and beyond my fan-boy inclinations, this is a great book by a talented author, which provides insight into both the movie and the process of writing it. I literally couldn't put it down. I wrote my second-ever Amazon review to praise it. Run, don't walk to buy a copy. (*****)